My English Teacher claimed that doctors have found trace amounts of plastic inside of everybody’s blood. When she said this, I didn’t say anything, but it sounded to me like one of those myths that get passed around in E-Mails all the time. I did a quick search on Google, Snopes, and this site to see any reference to this, but I didn’t see anything. So I figured I’d ask it here. Does anybody have any information as to whether or not doctors have been able to find plastic inside of people’s blood?
I am, of course, not refering to synthetic blood that can be used temporarily for blood transfusions. I mean perfectly healthy people who, apparently because we live in a world full of plastic, have trace amounts of plastic in their blood. Thanks.
I’m from Michigan, and I was born in the early 1980s. Because I was breastfed, it’s virtually certain that my adipose tissue contains measurable amounts of polybrominated biphenyls from the accidental release of large amounts of the chemical into the state’s food supply in the late 1970s.
What’s my point? We all have measurable amounts of unnatural chemicals in our bodies, and in many cases we don’t know what the effects of those chemicals are. It seems pretty likely that some chemicals contained in plastics or used in the manufacturing process are in our bodies - in fact, there’s been speculation at least that plasticizers (chemicals added to plastic in order to make it softer and more malleable) have estrogenic effects in the body and may be partially to blame for what appears to be an increase in the incidence of ambiguous genitalia in newborn boys.
Plants contain carcinogens by nature. Plants produce a huge number of chemicals for the specific purpose of fighting off infections, invading insects, and other plants. Notably, some plants produce fluoroacetic acid, solanine, nicotine, cyanide, and strychnine. In many cases, chemicals like these have been shown to be carcinogenic in rodents and are believed to be carcinogenic in humans as well.
You can’t escape the dangerous chemicals. Humans create them. Plants create them. Heavy metals are just sitting there in the ground. It is not possible to avoid them. Even in the eco-utopia imagined by some, all our food would be chock-full of these natural killers, as it has been for all of human history.
So it’s probably true that at least some chemicals used in plastic are found in the blood - but it’s also completely irrelevant. The world is a naturally hostile place.
“They”, “trace amount” and “plastic” are such incredibly vague terms that I immediately discard your English teacher’s quote out of hand. Just like “Don’t do that! It kills brain cells!”, this value-laden statement means absolutely nothing.
Excuse me? Squink, but, I don’t recall having my blood tested for PFOA, nor do I know anyone else who has. The only way that statement can be true is, if everyone on the planet is tested! If they had said “it is speculated,” or “we believe,” maybe.
Is there even a test for the trace amounts of which they speak?
I’d just like to point out that the links so far submitted refer to small molecules associated with plastics, not plastics (as noted a very broad category of molecules) themselves. That these molecules have been found in humans should come as no surprise, given their ubiquity as well as the ever-increasing sensitivity of analytical instrumentation. If a molecule is in the enviroment, and if you look for it hard enough in a person, chances are you’ll find it.
So, to the OP; are small-molecule plasticizers, flame retardants, and other molecules used in the manufacturing of plastics in the blood of people exposed to them? Undoubtedly. Are long-chain sybthetic polymers themselves to be found in human blood? Highly doubtful.
Oh, come on. Not even scientists take such statements literally. If I said that water is found in the blood of every living human on earth, would you also object to that statement on the basis that not everyone’s blood has been tested?
Most likely what Squink or his source means is that blood samples were taken from a sampling of people around the world, and the sample size was sufficiently large to state within a given confidence interval (typically 95%) that the results apply to everyone else on earth as well. This is basic first-year statistics.
I agree with what you say but there is no evidence that such an analysis was done, or that the scientists themselves came to such a conclusion. It appears to me that the author of the article sensationalized the findings by adding the “everybody on earth” lead-in.
The closest thing to this actually quoted was
and there is no mention at all of data that led to this conclusion.
Yeah, it’s a statistical universe, and we can wrap ourselves in knots riddles and enigmas by pondering our lack of proof that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, or not. That headline was written by a journalist who probably can’t even pronounce ‘perfluorooctanoic.’ Cut em some slack.
You can probably do it by extracting a 5ml sample of serum with dichloromethane/HCl, running it over a little column, slipping it into a little TOF Mass spectrometer, and measuring the size of the peak at 414 amu. A part per billion isn’t as hard to measure as it used to be.
So an article in the popular press seems to have badly mistated the result of a scientific study.
I’m SHOCKED! SHOCKED, I TELLS YA!
:: sigh ::
If we’re lucky, our science reporters at least have a minor in some sort of science. It seems endemic to scientific reporting that claims are heavily butchered in the press. We’re lucky if the reporter writing the story has even read the abstract to a study before reporting on it.
